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August 09, 2005

Vision for all, redux

Two weeks after the deluge, with all the discussions it has prompted, seems as good a time as any to recycle this post from a few months ago. I will also dig out my copy of "Vision Mumbai" and post some excerpts from it.

This is a note a friend and I put together as a response to "Vision Mumbai".

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All of us would like to see a Mumbai that gives its citizens a better quality of life. We see other cities and wish that Mumbai could emulate things about them, one way or another. What might a model Mumbai of the future look like?

Bombay First and McKinsey have issued "Vision Mumbai", presenting a detailed vision for this city in 2013. While we applaud the thought that has gone into it, and recognize that few other studies have offered as bold a statement of a future Mumbai, we believe it talks of a Mumbai designed for the upper-middle class car owner: the kind of citizen who will always be a minority here. Missing are the plans for the majority who don't and won't have cars, who must use public transport, whose access to open green space shrinks daily.

We'd like to articulate instead a new vision for Mumbai that all its citizens will be happy with, proud to be part of.

These principles will drive this articulation:

Dump the doomsday predictions. For decades, people have said Mumbai is about to collapse. Yet Mumbai has grown and flourished. Of course services are strained and we have to find solutions. But any future Mumbai will be built not on hand-wringing doom and gloom, but on the great strength this city has: the industry of its people. All its people.

Focus on people. Any plans for the city must have at their heart the greatest good to the greatest number of people: all of Mumbai's people. Jamie Lerner, mayor in the 1960s of Brazil's Curitiba, a celebrated model of urban planning, would explain that his guiding principle was that the poorer you were, the better the services you should have. This principle must drive plans in Mumbai as well.

High quality public transport. Plans for improving transport in the city must begin with public transport, which the majority of the city uses. Public transport must also be of a quality enough to pull car owners out of their cars.

Restrict car use. Experience the world over has shown that unrestricted car use devours and dehumanizes a city. Together with a focus on public transport, there must be a steadily declining emphasis and reliance on cars. Even though car owners are a minority of the population, the city invariably develops to satisfy the demands of cars, and efforts to satisfy the demand only inflate it relentlessly.

This must change. As a corollary, better traffic management is vital as well.

Access to open space/the seafront. The lesson of urban planning everywhere is that open, green space is critical to quality of life. In Mumbai's case, we also have the sea. Easy access to the sea must be a part of any new vision. The quality of public spaces is important: they must be clean, functional and able to draw people from their homes. Streets must be free of loose stones and dirt, must tempt people to pause and pass time. Pavements must be clean and level, attractive and encouraging to the pedestrian.

Good governance is key. But apart from committed bureaucratic and political support, we need more vigorous peoples' participation, involvement and responsibility in day-to-day governance. We need a determined strengthening of our institutions. Clogged drains, uncleared garbage, the struggle to get clearances, judicial delays, poor policing -- these are the evidence of the failure of our institutions. Plans to reform the city must tackle up front the issue of how to deliver good governance, and offer credible answers. This is basic.

"Vision Mumbai", to us, is defined not by such principles, but by the desire to make Mumbai internationally competitive, an illusory second Shanghai. An alternative vision must tackle issues that are not adequately addressed there:

The goal for Mumbai cannot be to repeat Shanghai or Singapore, nor to chase some mythical but meaningless "world-class" status. Instead, the goal must be simple: the happiness of Mumbai's people. If Mumbai is a city whose residents live happy, fulfilled lives, it will automatically be a model for other cities around the world.

What, therefore, are the factors that make life for a city-dweller happy? Any vision of Mumbai must set itself the task of answering that question.

4 comments:

1) Please define quality of life. One gazillion people with access to a toilet? 2.5 Gazillion with money to spare to purchase video phones which display porn MMS clips? Vague.

2)Public Transport - cycle and rickshaw are NOT good forms of public transport. All they do is IMPEDE traffic. Replace cycle, rickshaw with very well connected bus/train service, and you don't need cycle, rickshaw.

3)Legislation - reviewing rent control laws means having the ability to evict people, plus it also means that many other places will have higher rents. You have a slightly leftist bent, I doubt repaling rent laws would appeal to you, though they ARE necessary to improve the system.

4)Revamp land use - again you won't like any of the answers to this, because most of the results will be: "The illegally occupied slums on this land need to be removed so we can better use of it"...

Good roads and highways are not used just by private motorists. They are also used by buses, taxis, delivery vans, trucks supplying vegetables/petrol/water/raw materials, and AMBULANCES. If you have an express highway connecting village A and decent hospital B, who benefits? A rich Mumbaikar living on malabar hill?

Good roads are very important. Period.

This does not make good railways and ticketing mutually exclusive, but please, roads need to be right up there.

And the goal of mumbai should be to be world-class, because if you ask most of the elected officials at any point of time (even NOW) they will tell you that their electorate is happy. So let's aim for something else.

Sunil, please see the Postscript to my next post for a link to the McKinsey report.

TTG: quality of life? Open spaces. Reasonable commute in non-brutal conditions. Clean surroundings. Drainage able to cope with monsoon floods.

Public transport: buses and trains (mass carriers). Nevertheless, you can't get away from presence of taxis/rickshaws/cycles. What's your problem with cycles? Amsterdam (among other places) has dedicated cycle lanes used by thousands of white-collar commuters.

I love the comments that make assumptions like "You have a slightly leftist bent...". Regarding the rent control act, I've written in various places about repealing it. Here is a better stated case for that (and other things) than I can manage, that I quoted in this space some months ago.

I don't recall, in this post or elsewhere, saying we should ignore the roads, or that we don't need good roads.